Obamacare and Cancelled Individual Health Coverage

I support the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare; let that be stated at the outset. Its rollout since Oct. 1, though, has been abysmal. The HealthCare.gov website where many Americans need to go to sign up for coverage has been down way too often, slow way too often, and so poorly imple­mented that insurance companies can't be sure who in fact has signed up for coverage.

HealthCare.gov home page

The kerfluffle over that has however been overshadowed in the last week by the issue over cancelled insurance. Presi­dent Obama promised on many occasions going back to 2009 that "if you like your current health plan, you can keep it." Well, as it turns out, that's not exactly so.

Glenn Kessler, the "Fact Checker" at The Washington Post, recently awarded the president a maximum number of hated "Pinocchios" — four — for "Obama’s pledge that ‘no one will take away’ your health plan."

Obama said in a speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009, "... no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

President Obama addresses
the American Medical Association
June 15, 2009

Alas, it wasn't, and still isn't, exactly true. Kessler writes:

... a key part of the law is forcing insurers to offer an “essential health benefits” package, providing coverage in 10 categories. The list includes: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.

Health benefits packages that lack those features will have to be discontinued as of next year. Some people who get their health insurance through their employers may notice increased premiums to help pay for additional coverage. But hundreds of thousands of those who buy their own insurance are now receiving outright cancellation notices.

In many cases, those unfortunates will have to buy completely new health packages that will probably cost them a lot more.

Yet some luckier ones will get no cancellation notices. They will find that their existing plans were "grandfathered" into the government's implementation of the Affordable Care Act, meaning they can keep them.

The unfortunate ones whose plans were not grandfathered in are very likely ones who bought those plans after the magic cutoff date, March 23, 2010, when the ACA was signed into law. Only individual plans that were in hand prior to that date are grandfathered in.

Those who have to scramble to get new, expensive insurance, says the lead article in today's Washington Post, "For consumers whose health premiums will go up under new law, sticker shock leads to anger," are finding the plans that are claimed by their insurers to be the lawfully mandated replacements for their cancelled plans are way more costly:

Marlys Dietrick, a 60-year-old artist from San Antonio, said she had high hopes that the new law would help many of her friends who are chefs, actors or photographers get insured. But she said they have been turned off by high premiums and deductibles and would rather pay the fine. 

“I am one of those Democrats who wanted it to be better than this,” she said. 

Her insurer, Humana, informed her that her plan was being canceled and that the rate for herself and her 21-year-old son for a plan compliant with the new law would rise from $300 to $705. On the federal Web site [HealthCare.gov], she found a comparable plan for $623 a month. Because her annual income is about $80,000, she doesn’t qualify for subsidies. 

A cheaper alternative on the federal exchange, she said, had a premium of $490 a month — but it was an HMO plan rather than the PPO plan she currently has. “I wouldn’t be able to go to the doctor I’ve been going to for years,” she said. “That is not a deal.” 

And both the HMO and PPO exchange plans she examined had family deductibles of $12,700, compared with her current $7,000.

And:

David Prestin, 48, who operates a gas station and diner at a truck stop in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, was unhappy to learn recently that his premiums are slated to rise from $923 to $1,283 next year under Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. The insurer said it needed to add maternity care to comply with the Affordable Care Act. 

The issue of maternity coverage is a sensitive one for Prestin and his wife, Kathie. They had one child seven years ago, but after she had five miscarriages, they discovered she had an immune issue that prevented her from successfully completing a pregnancy. 

At the same time, Prestin said, the new plan would reduce coverage for things he and Kathie need, such as free annual checkups. 

The Prestins explored HealthCare.gov. They are not eligible for subsidies, but they found a cheaper plan than the one being offered by their insurer. However, there was another problem: It would have required the couple to switch from the doctors they have seen for more than 16 years and travel more than 100 miles from their home to the nearest major hospital center for treatment — in Green Bay, Wis.

And:

After receiving a letter from her insurer that her plan was being discontinued, Deborah Persico, a 58-year-old lawyer in the District, found a comparable plan on the city’s new health insurance exchange. But her monthly premium, now $297, would be $165 higher, and her maximum out-of-pocket costs would double. 

That means she could end up paying at least $5,000 more a year than she does now. “That’s just not fair,” said Persico, who represents indigent criminal defendants. “This is ridiculous.”

Deborah Persico,
whose individual health insurance
plan is being cancelled

In fairness, I have to note that the plans that are now being forced into cancellation by the ACA are ones in which the insureds were able to cherry-pick the types of coverage he/she/they wanted. Don't need maternity coverage? Leave it out. Never expect to need pediatric services? Bypass it. That keeps the buyer's premiums and deductibles down.

But it also keeps dollars from said cherry-pickers from moving through the system to help cover maternity and pediatric care for those buyers of individual coverage who need them but truly otherwise can't afford them. I imagine Marlys Dietrick, who makes $80,000 a year, can scrimp and save and ultimately afford the $490-per-month plan that would make her, sad to say, need to switch doctors.

Yet it's also true that nothing the president said in the last four years adequately prepared Ms. Dietrick — or the Prestins, or Ms. Persico — for this.

Stop Arguing, Start Growing

Economist
Lawrence H. Summers

In this morning's Washington Post, economist Lawrence Summers has a great suggestion. A professor and past president at Harvard, Summers was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton, and economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010. In his op-ed piece "In shutdown debate, focus should be on growth instead of deficit," he asserts:

Data from [the Congressional Budget Office] imply that an increase of just 0.2 percent in annual growth would entirely eliminate the projected long-term budget gap. Increasing growth, in addition to solving debt problems, would also raise household incomes, increase U.S. economic strength relative to other nations, help state and local governments meet their obligations and prompt investments in research and development.

In other words, Congress and the president should stop arguing "about the precise timing of continuing resolutions and debt-limit extensions" and start working together to spur economic growth.

Summers says this can be done — indeed, must be done — in a bipartisan way:

Spurring growth is an area where neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on good ideas. We need more public infrastructure investment, but we also need to reduce regulatory barriers that hold back private infrastructure. We need more investment in education but also increases in accountability for those who provide it. We need more investment in the basic science behind renewable energy technologies, but in the medium term we need to take advantage of the remarkable natural gas resources that have recently become available to the United States. We need to ensure that government has the tools to work effectively in the information age but also to ensure that public policy promotes entrepreneurship.

Infrastructure investment
is sorely needed today

Breaking this down by political sides: Democrats want more public infrastructure investment; more investment in education; more investment in the science behind renewable energy technologies; and for the government to be given the tools to work effectively in the information age. Republicans want reduced governmental regulatory barriers; increases in accountability for schools and educators; acceptance of natural gas, as a bridge to "clean" energy as a way to fight global warming; and U.S. policies that favor, not hinder, private entrepreneurship and investment.

There is ample room here for Republicans and Democrats to "meet in the middle" and to take the conversation from wrangling over the budget to talking instead about America's economic growth. Says Summers:

If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to “budget deals” were devoted instead to “growth strategies,” we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example.

Post columnist
E.J. Dionne Jr.

As Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. says in "Obama can’t waste this moment" on the same October 14, 2013, op-ed page:

The United States should build [a strong economy], not just cut [the federal budget]. We should invest again in an infrastructure whose decayed condition ought to shame us. We should deal with high ongoing unemploy­ment, reverse the rise of inequality and give poor and working-class kids real opportunities for upward mobility.

My fellow liberal Dionne sadly doesn't mention the conservative priorities Summers lists as needing also to be included in any eventual deal.

A recent opinion column by moderate-to-conservative Post economics writer Robert J. Samuelson, "The shutdown heralds a new economic norm," however, takes a similar pro-growth tack:

Post columnist
Robert J. Samuelson

The story behind the story [of the budget battles] is that prolonged slow growth threatens to upend our political and social order. Economic growth is a wondrous potion. It encourages lending because borrowers can repay debts from rising incomes. It supports bigger government because a growing economy expands the tax base and makes modest deficits bearable. Despite recessions, it buoys public optimism because people are getting ahead. ...

Slow economic growth now imperils [the post-WWII order that saw much economic expansion]. Credit standards have tightened, and more Americans are leery of borrowing. Government spending — boosted by an aging population eligible for Social Security and Medicare — has outrun our willingness to be taxed. The mismatch is the basic cause of “structural” budget deficits and, by extension, today’s strife over the debt ceiling and the government “shutdown.”

Samuelson agrees with Dionne and Summers (and me): what we most need today is government policy — a compromise policy, as Summers says — that boosts economic growth.

Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

— Song lyric by Johnny Mercer

During these tense times when the government is partially shut down, we may wonder what has gone wrong. Why are we so polarized between liberal Democrats and hard-line Republicans that we can't pass a budget or even a continuing resolution through Congress, and possibly can't head off the threat of a default on paying our government's bills?

Washington Post columnist
George F. Will

George F. Will has a column in today's Washington Post that gives some insight. "When liberals became scolds" has it that liberalism went wrong in America as far back as the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, and within two days liberals were downplaying the identity of the putative assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and playing up a kind of collective American guilt that stemmed from “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots," per then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Will extends the thought:

New York Times columnist
James Reston

The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

(Oswald was actually a self-styled communist, not an "extremist on the right," nor a "bigot." The Warren Commission, headed by the then-Chief Justice, determined that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, though many have since believed he had co-conspirators.)

Will's point is this:

The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.

Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s ...

... and, he adds, led to the election of the conservative President Ronald Reagan, who was first sworn in in 1980.

Adversarial culture? Will says:

Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.

35th president John F. Kennedy

As a 16-year-old in 1963, I lived through those times. And, yes, we had a lot of material well-being ... though we also discovered the "other America":  a large minority of our citizens who were mired in poverty from one generation to the next. Too, we all had to confront the reality of racial prejudice in the land. But as of the time of JFK's assassination, most Americans of a liberal bent were still inclined to "ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive" more than rue the negative.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1968, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War and in the wake of the twin assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, that had flipped. To many who were then speaking from and for the left, America was now considered a poisonous place. The country's history was mainly one of several negative -isms: racism, sexism, imperialism, and the like. "Tear down the walls!" went the leftist mantra.

If you were a liberal, no matter how close to or far from the center, you were infected by it. America: angry leftists wanted to end it, moderate liberals wanted to mend it ... but all on the left came to think more in terms of its historical poison than about the sheer nobility of the grand American enterprise.

That's what George Will is getting at:

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment ... 

Hence:

The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

Those "lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom" which took over the liberal mindset were typically couched, accordingly, in negative terms. Liberals' occasional perfunctory nods to America's greatness were at odds with an overarching narrative of American guilt. This is a narrative which — I think Will is correct here — has not played well with American audiences in general.

President Obama
ought to look like this
more often

Thus during the Obama presidency we have heard the president called, by his enemies, not a real American. Thus the endless foolish assertion that he was not really born an American citizen. Thus the claim that Obamacare is actually a foot-in-the-door for an alien socialism. And thus the tea party, which would rather bring down Obamacare than make sure the federal government has enough funds to stay solvent.

I think Will is right: liberals started shooting themselves in the foot as far back as the JFK assassination. I call myself oldstyleliberal because I would rather we liberals take back the night and start talking up America's fundamental greatness again. Then, after we have stopped demonizing the right, and vice versa, perhaps our politicians can get back to doing what they're supposed to do: engaging in the fruitful art of compromise.

Polarization in America

We are currently in the throes of a fiscal showdown in which the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, the Democratic-controlled Senate, and our Democratic president, Barack Obama, can't agree on how to reopen a partially shut-down government or how to avoid, come October 17, risking a default due to failure to raise the legal ceiling on the size of the federal debt. The deadlock can be traced in large part to how the various members of the House of Representatives came to office in the 2012 election.

Polarized 2012 vote
for U.S. House of Representatives
(Click on map to enlarge)

The map above shows how politically polarized was the 2012 vote for members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It comes from a recent Washington Post article, "Shutdown’s roots lie in deeply embedded divisions in America’s politics."

Each congressional district in each state is represented by a colored square. The deeper the color in each district, the more one-sided the vote was for either the Republican winner in 2012 (red) or the Democratic winner (blue). (Two districts that are now vacant are shown in gray.) The pastel colors represent districts where the vote was "close," while deeper blues and reds signify "safe" districts where the 2012 winner is either very likely to be re-elected in 2014 (the medium shades) or a virtual shoo-in (the deepest shades).

Notice how blue the states from New Jersey and New York up into New England are, and likewise the West Coast states. Also notice how red the states of the Deep South are. But even the reddest state has its pockets of blue, while some (but not all) of the blue states have their own pockets of red.

Washington Post columnist
Colbert King

Why does this geographic variation exist in "one nation under God" America? Post opinion writer Colbert King blames part of it on "The rise of the New Confederacy": "... an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government."

The insurgents of the New Confederacy equal, of course, the tea party. It is in the reddest districts that we are most apt to find a tea party-affiliated member of the House. King writes: "[The] conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia."

Many of these states are ones that made up the Old Confederacy during the Civil War (shown here in yellow):

(Click on map to enlarge)

Yet it seems that tea partiers in Congress also come from Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and West Virginia. Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia were "border states" where slavery was legal, but which did not secede from the Union. Some of the remainder of the tea-party states were territories during the 1861-1865 Civil War, and were settled in large part by whites who originated in the Confederate States. Yet others, though they were "free states" where slavery was illegal, arguably were settled by people of the same cultural backgrounds as the southerners, which might explain why certain districts in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, went to tea partiers in 2012, and why Ohio is such a crazy quilt of red and blue that it so often acts as the decisive "swing state" in presidential elections.

Colin Woodard writes in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America of how North America was — except for "First Nation," which has maintained its original Native American culture — settled by ten now-hidden "nations." Those "nations'" cultural antecedents in Europe, so different from one another, have been carried forward to the present day, says Woodard.

Here's a map of the eleven "American nations," including "First Nation":

The eleven American "nations"
(Click on map to enlarge)

Compare this map with the first one above showing the blue and red congressional districts. Notice in the first map how blue most of "Yankeedom" is, both in its original East Coast wing and in its later-settled Upper Midwest wing. Ever wonder why Minnesota is so traditionally blue? Well, it was settled in large part by people moving westward from New England and New York, in the East Coast part of "Yankeedom." And those people of eastern "Yankeedom" had their Old World roots in Puritan society in England during the 1600s. The Puritans brought certain cultural assumptions with them to the New World — ones that have led their descendants to be abolitionists who opposed slavery in the nineteenth century, and to be progressives who have voted solidly Democratic in the twentieth. Moreover, it was their "Yankeedom" posterity who were the main non-Hispanic whites to settle the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington — and on up into Canada — to make up the solid-blue nation Woodard calls "Left Coast."

Journalist-author
Colin Woodard

In terms of its power base, meanwhile, the Confederacy was largely made up of the nation Woodard calls, unsurprisingly, the "Deep South." Yet certain northern and western parts of the Confederacy, including much of Oklahoma and Texas, were sections of "Greater Appalachia," and "Tidewater" — coastal North Carolina, Virginia, and much of the Delmarva Peninsula — also played a big role in the rebellion against the Union. All of these "nations" are conspicuously red today. Though the three had distinct cultural roots in the Old World, in the New World they banded together (sometimes uneasily and, in the case of "Greater Appalachia," in split fashion) to defend the South's "peculiar institution" of slavery. So why is, say, much of Indiana so red today, even though there were no slaves there in 1861? Woodard would say it's because the southern two-thirds of the state remain part of "Greater Appalachia," and the denizens of the entire nation-within-a-nation of "Greater Appalachia" largely tend to vote red nowadays.

Look at the "Midlands," a "nation" that sprang from the westward movement of settlers coming from much of Pennsylvania. Those Pennsylvanians in "Midlands" were originally Quakers who, though they had different cultural norms than the Puritans, were notably tolerant of all peoples and engendered a polity that today favors the liberal desideratum of multiculturalism. That polity in the present day tends to the blue end of the spectrum. Notice that "Midlands" crosses through Illinois, just below Chicago, explaining why the blue parts of Illinois in the first map are not just centered in the Windy City, which is actually in "Yankeedom" anyway. Bluish "Midlands" widens out in Missouri, Iowa, and points south and west, possibly explaining many of the blue squares in those areas on the first map.

The "Far West" provides few squares of any color to the first map because it remains so thinly populated. Look at Colorado in the first map; it's both blue and red. Since much of the "Far West" was settled, late in the game of spreading westward, by people who came from the Confederacy or its cultural soulmates on its periphery, it's no wonder there are so (relatively) many red squares in Colorado and in the other states of the "Far West" nation.

Admittedly, there have to be yet other factors helping to explain why some regions and states are solid red, some are solid blue, and some are mixed. But Woodard's concept of eleven separate "nations" that we are no longer very aware of but explain a lot of our entrenched cultural and political attitudes goes a long way toward answering that question.

Assault weapons ban dead in Congress :-(

Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid

On March 19, 2013, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he will not bring a bill banning military-style assault weapons to the floor of the U.S. Senate for an up-or-down vote.

Sales of semiautomatic rifles of the AR-15 type, such as the Bushmaster .223-caliber recently used by Adam Lanza in Newtown, CT, to kill 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, ought to be banned by law, but lobbying pushback by the National Rifle Association in the aftermath of Newtown has nixed the deal. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation reinstating the 1994 ban which lapsed in 2004, and it even managed to get out of committee. The Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), on March 14 approved Feinstein's bill. But Reid, needing 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster on the Senate floor, said he could get fewer than 40 votes for it.

"Lacking the numbers to overcome a likely Republican filibuster," says an editorial by The Washington Post, "[Reid] was reluctant to force a floor vote that could imperil the reelection prospects of several of his fellow Democrats. Lacking the numbers to overcome a likely Republican filibuster, he was reluctant to force a floor vote that could imperil the reelection prospects of several of his fellow Democrats."

Not exactly a profile in courage, I'd say, Sen. Reid.

So it's dead, for now, at the federal level. Unless someone manages to amend the bill that actually has reached the Senate floor to put the assault weapons ban back in. Fat chance of that happening, though.

How sad.

Maryland Gov.
Martin O'Malley

Now it's up to individual states to do the right thing. My state, Maryland, has a forward-looking governor, Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, who has introduced tough gun control legislation in the General Assembly. It would ban sales of AR-15-type weapons ... except that the Judiciary Committee of the House of Delegates is seriously considering watering it down.

That's a bad idea, and a recent editorial from The Baltimore Sun tells why. I think everyone should read it and consider it. It says that

... such weapons show up again and again in mass shootings. According to Mother Jones magazine, which has cataloged every mass shooting in the United States since 1982, about a quarter of all mass shooters had assault weapons, and more than half had assault weapons, high capacity magazines, or both ...

What makes these weapons so deadly? They are civilian copies of military weapons designed with features that make them more lethal.

The AR-15, for example, has a pistol grip, which helps a shooter pull the trigger more quickly and to better control the recoil, allowing him to fire more rapidly with more accuracy. It also enables shooting from the hip and spraying fire from side to side — something that would be deadly when firing into a crowd but useless in a self-defense situation.

When fired rapidly, a gun's barrel can quickly become too hot to handle. A barrel shroud, common on many of the models listed in the governor's bill, enables a shooter to hold the gun with a second hand without burning himself. A forward grip, which is somewhat less common, achieves the same purpose.

A folding, detachable or telescoping stock helps make an assault weapon easier to carry and conceal. That is frequently a factor in mass shooting situations.

A threaded barrel allows the easy attachment of a silencer or a flash suppressor. The latter prevents the shooter from being temporarily blinded by the muzzle flash, particularly in low-light conditions, enabling him to fire more quickly and accurately. It also helps conceal the position of the shooter ...


Yes, the same rifle models are often used legitimately for target shooting and hunting. Yes, some semiautomatic handguns that would not be banned can be just a lethal as the semiautomatic rifles that would. And yes, there are huge numbers of these rifles already out there that will still pose a threat: guns that many potential miscreants will have easy access to if they, as Adam Lanza's slain mother would have done, can but pass a background check.

But banning the sale of new military-style assault weapons, even if that has to be done at the state level only, will save innocent lives. And that's what counts most here.

Whither the Art of Compromise?

A shibboleth is "a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning." The word "birther" has become a shibboleth of the left, used to castigate the right. The saying "Obama wasn't even born in the U.S." has likewise become a shibboleth, used to scorn the left.

So a shibboleth can be a word, a phrase, a sentence ... or, I would suggest, an entire column such as "Walking the Walk," by Hendrik Hertzberg, in this week's The New Yorker.

Hendrik Hertzberg

Not that I disagree with much Hertzberg (pictured at left) says. He's a liberal chortling about how President Obama, in his Second Inaugural Address last month, let loose the dogs of progressivism and urged all the various and sundry groups that voted to return him to the White House to form an ongoing coalition that will henceforth marginalize all those voting to send Obama to the showers. I'm a liberal who voted for Obama and who celebrated his victory with the best of them. But, still ...

... what about the 49 percent who voted for Mitt Romney? What about the large minority of Americans who live in red states, or red congressional districts, and have increasingly resented not only Obama and his Democratic Party, but the whole mindset/worldview that party stands for?

They are Americans, too, last time I checked. Why do we liberals need to so smugly smirk that we've had a closet monopoly on truth for the last 50 years and more, and now that Obama's become the first Democratic president since F.D.R. to be re-elected by a popular-vote majority, it's about time we flaunted it?

This isn't smart politics, not for the long run, because it's bad for the country to continue with divided, nothing-can-really-get-done government in an era when we need to tackle big problems like the federal deficit, the semi-stalled economic recovery, America's widening inequality of income and opportunity, global climate change, immigration reform, gun-control legislation, a crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. — not to mention our evolving defense posture and our seems-to-be-dwindling ability to lead abroad.

Politics is said to be the art of compromise ... yet compromise is an art that we've mostly forgotten.

Ban semiautomatic assault weapons?

I say yes! Semiautomatic rifles, aka "assault weapons," ought to be banned. The Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle recently used by Adam Lanza in Newtown, CT, to kill 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School (not to mention Lanza's mother and Lanza himself) ought to be ancient history.

But wait! Don't Americans have a Second Amendment right to keep and bear whatever arms they desire?

Bushmaster .223-Cal. Rifle
with "Banana Clip"
Ammo Magazine

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." So reads the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the National Rifle Association believes it covers the right to possess AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles, such as AK-47s, not to mention semiautomatic handguns that likewise can fire numerous rounds of ammunition in very short order. (The Bushmaster .223 is one of several versions of the AR-15 being sold.)

Unlike fully automatic firearms that keep firing bullets as long as the trigger is pulled back, semiautomatics require a separate trigger pull for each round fired.

Bolt-Action Rifle
(Sliding bolt is on the
right, near the trigger)

Older rifle and shotgun designs are not semiautomatic. In addition to requiring one trigger pull per round, they require that each new round be loaded into the firing chamber individually by manually operating a bolt or lever near the trigger or pumping a handle beneath the barrel.

Fully automatic firearms have been banned since the 1930s, when gangsters and mobsters used Tommy guns to mow one another down. Semiautomatic pistols have been in common use for many decades, and semiautomatic "long guns" — basically rifles, but also shotguns — have become the most popular firearms purchased in America. Yet new purchases of long semiautomatics were outlawed, albeit temporarily, between 1994 and 2004, after which the assault weapons ban was allowed to perish by Congress. In the wake of Newtown, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wants now to reinstate that ban.

Should that happen? I say yes, but ...

... will banning these weapons prospectively rather than retrospectively — that is, not allowing new semiautomatic rifles to be made, bought, or owned while "grandfathering in" existing ones — do any good?

And would such a ban pass constitutional muster?

I have looked in vain for statistics on how many semiautomatic rifles are currently owned in the U.S., but given that various versions of semiautomatic rifle are being called our most popular firearms today, sales-wise, there have to be millions in existence already. No one knows exactly how many pistols, rifles, and shotguns Americans own, taken all together, but I have seen estimates of 290 million, or nearly one per person. If 1/3 of those are rifles, and if 3/4 of the rifles are semiautomatic, then there must be some 72.5 million semiautomatic rifles abroad in the land. And that's likely an underestimate.

I can't see the good in doing no more than turning off the tap now on new semiautomatic rifles, if that many already exist and won't happily be relegated to the trash heap by their owners.

So I think we need to do something about those long-format semiautomatic weapons presently possessed and dearly cherished by gun owners throughout the land. My remedy? Tax the hell out of them, while also setting up a federal buyback fund (admittedly pricey) to take up weapons that owners don't want to pay the tax on.

By "taxes" I mean federal fees — steep ones — to license every gun owner and to register every firearm in the land that has not been disabled and is in good working order. Just as we pay a fee to renew our driver's licenses and auto registrations, gun owners should have to shell out money on an annual basis for exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

That means there needs to be a registry at the federal level for gun owners and for the guns they own.

So there ought to be a ban on newly minted semiautomatic rifles and a tax on those that exist at present, augmented by a buyback of weapons that owners don't want to be taxed on.

Would all this pass constitutional muster? I don't think anyone can say for sure.

Justice Antonin Scalia

In its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment supports an individual's right to possess a firearm for purposes of self-defense. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the decision for a 5-4 conservative majority.

The idea that the right to bear arms belongs to an individual and not just a group, such as a state militia, was established by the Heller decision for the first time in U.S. constitutional law. Gun-control proponents such as myself took gas at that, but Scalia and the majority on the court said, seemingly once and for all, that self-defense using firearms in the home is a constitutionally protected part of the fabric of American life.

The Heller decision added to and clarified the court's position in United States v. Miller in 1939:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

It seems likely that, in view of Heller, a ban on semiautomatic rifles would pass constitutional muster only if:

1. These rifles are properly deemed "dangerous" weapons, and/or
2. These rifles are properly deemed "unusual" weapons, and/or
3. These rifles are not clearly used for "self-defense."

When I say "and/or" above, I mean that it's not clear how the Court might conjoin these three criteria in reaching a decision on a newly instituted assault weapons ban.

Heller established the right of individuals to own firearms for self-defense in the home and left open the extent to which that right applies to the use of weapons for self-defense outside the home. I think it would be hard to claim that weapons such as the Bushmaster .223, sold as "sporting" rifles that are intended for hunting and target shooting, are self-defense weapons in either context ... but I am not going to bet the farm on it.

Dangerous? Unusual? We know from the wording of the decision that the Heller majority upheld, in broad brush strokes, historical bans on weapons that qualify as both dangerous and unusual. What about weapons that are one but not the other? The numbers of AR-15s in American hands today clearly make them, to say the least, not uncommon. How "dangerous" must they be before that characteristic overrides the fact that so many of them presently exist?

30-Round Magazine
for an AR-15 Rifle

Moves are afoot not only to ban such wea­pons, but also the high-capa­city ammu­nition maga­zines that hold more than 10 rounds. If such a maga­zine ban were en­acted, it would mani­festly reduce the danger posed by semi­automatic rifles. It there­fore might ulti­mately convince the Court that the as­sault weapons ban per se does not meet the Miller/Heller test.

If the Court struck down a new assault weapons ban, we would even more than before need (I think) to place a steep tax on guns and gun ownership. As I say, that would require that we license owners and register guns. And those are moves that have never before been tested constitutionally. I have no idea whether they would pass muster, but I do know that their first hurdle would not be the courts. It would be Congress and the political will of the nation.